Martin T. Gunderson ran one of Goodhue County's most prosperous flour mills on the North Fork of the Zumbro and, in 1896, began generating electricity from it for the village, the first electric light in Kenyon. The year before, he had built this house at 107 Gunderson Boulevard: a Queen Anne in the Free Classic manner, with a corner tower, wraparound porch and classical columns, built by local contractor Philip Kramer from a plan in the mail-order catalog of George F. Barber of Knoxville, Tennessee, the most prolific supplier of house plans to small-town America in the 1890s.
The house stayed in the family for eighty years. In 1975 the M. T. Gunderson heirs donated it, furnished as it had been in the 1890s, to the newly formed Kenyon Area Historical Society, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is a rare thing: a Victorian house museum whose contents are the original family's, not a curated approximation. The society opens it for guided tours, often in period dress, on the third weekend of each month from May through September, and rents it for showers, reunions, weddings and holiday gatherings. The council funded a historic structure study by Wold Architects in 2019 and an air-conditioning system in 2021; donations go to KAHS Gunderson House, c/o City Hall, 709 2nd Street.